The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth

The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth. By Mark Mazzetti, The Penguin Press HC, 2013, 400 pp.

When the calls home stopped in November of 2011, friends
assumed the worst for Jude Kenan Mohammad. A few years earlier, the young
Pakistani-American born in North Carolina had come under the sway of a
radicalized Islamic preacher, who taught him about violent jihad and urged him
to seek out his roots in Pakistan. Soon, Mohammad departed for Pakistan’s
tribal lands where, apart from some calls to family on the holidays, he all but
disappeared.In May, the White House finally acknowledged what many
back in North Carolina had long come to believe: Mohammad had been killed by an
American drone strike one and a half years earlier. There had been no trial, no
public presentation of evidence. He would have been twenty-three years old.Mohammad’s death was just one small piece of a
decade-old, shadowy war started in the years following the September 11 attacks
by President George W. Bush and expanded with unwavering intensity by his
successor, Barack Obama. Waged high in the skies above rural Pakistan and
Yemen, and in the back alleys of Somalia and Afghanistan, it is a war that has
received virtually no scrutiny from the public, even as it summarily takes the
lives of thousands of individuals, many of them innocent civilians—and a few,
like Mohammad, American citizens.A slew of new books seek to cast light on the private
meeting rooms and hidden bunkers from which this covert war has been conducted,
among them Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield; Daniel Klaidman’s Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the
Soul of the Obama Presidency; and Mark Mazzetti’s The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army,
and a War at the Ends of the Earth. Mazzetti’s is the most richly illustrative of the
internal tensions and often careless decision making of America’s leaders in
the last decade—and the least burdened by outrage.The result, from the veteran New York Times national security reporter, is an even-handed
tale of this era that will likely leave the reader outraged nonetheless. As
senior members of the George W. Bush administration scrambled to confront a new
terrorist reality after 9/11, they reshaped America’s military into a second
spy agency, a task for which it was poorly equipped. Meanwhile, as Mazzetti
scrupulously documents, the Central Intelligence Agency found itself converted
from the delicate art of spycraft into a paramilitary “killing machine, an
organization consumed with man hunting.”“Increasingly they were mimicking
each other,” Mazzetti writes of the ensuing confusion and discord in the world
of black ops. “The CIA... becoming ever more a lethal, paramilitary
organization, and the Pentagon ramping up its spying operations to support a special-operations
war. There were no clear ground rules.”Some of the details of how this came to pass may not
surprise a close reader of the news. Eager to prosecute the “war on terror,”
the Bush administration sought to cut through bureaucratic red tape wherever
possible, without regard for the fact that much of it had been set up in the
wake of past controversies. When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked a
man who would go on to become his chief of special operations whether it was
legal for the Pentagon to conduct operations in countries with which the United
States was not actively at war, the man replied that it was, comparing it
favorably to Richard Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos during the
Indochina conflicts. Never mind that those strikes were among the most
scandalous acts of Nixon’s scandal-laden tenure.This idea that history repeats itself is a central theme
of Mazzetti’s book. Back in the 1980s, before there was the infamous Blackwater
organization, there was a little-known, off-the-books Pentagon spy unit known
as Intelligence Support Activity. The unit’s secret budget and retired special
operators became “the perfect ingredients for a toxic recipe,” Mazzetti writes.
It was shut down within two years, after a blistering inspector general report
complained that the government “should have learned the lesson of the 70s”
about creating such units.But “memories are short,” Mazzetti
writes. Instead, over the past fifty years, a “familiar pattern” has played
out: “Presidential approval of aggressive CIA operations, messy congressional
investigations when the details of these operations were exposed, retrenchment
and soul-searching at Langley, criticisms that the CIA had become risk averse,
then another period of aggressive covert action.”This concept of the inevitability of presidential
overreach helps explain why these failings seem to continuously recur, but it
can also have a distasteful exculpatory effect. And it does little to explain
one of the greatest mysteries of the present era of unaccountable, secret
warfare: how did a former constitutional law professor, who campaigned
specifically on drawing down extrajudicial forms of warfare and detention, come
to expand those very programs instead?Here the book leaves its sole frustration, for even as
Mazzetti details Obama’s shortcomings—the failure to close the detention
facility at Guantanamo Bay, the ratcheting up of the drone war to unprecedented
levels—he chooses not to weigh in on whether such actions taken ten years after
the terrorist attacks of 9/11 deserve harsher scrutiny than ones taken in the
immediate aftermath.“The
foundations of the secret war were laid by a conservative Republican president
and embraced by a liberal Democratic one who became enamored of what he had inherited,”
Mazzetti writes at one point. History will have to decide who deserves the
harsher judgment.Joshua Hersh is the Beirut-based Middle East correspondent for the Huffington Post. He previously covered
foreign policy for the same publication in Washington, DC. On Twitter: @joshuahersh.